Here’s an email from the VP of Sales stating he’s having printer problems — in his home office in Boston.

Bob the accountant says his PC, over in Campus Building #2, is at a crawl.

Julie in Development is trying to download a file from Microsoft and says something’s wrong with Internet access.

The Senior VP of Professional Services has a new employee starting tomorrow — and he forgot to tell you until today.

Oh, and his print server is “acting up.”

Good bye, strategic thinking and doing! Hello, firefighting…made all the more painful and time consuming because your users are spread out in various locations.

What to do? Trek on over to Building #2? Get on the phone with Bob? Fire up a bunch of windows to deal with all the issues and meddle with various cumbersome Windows utilities to try to fix the problems? Not for long.